Ronan Farrow Wants to ‘Redirect The Conversation’ About His Family

Ronan Farrow—he of the goldenrod coif, quippy Twitter account and highly-scrutinized genes—is preparing to launch his upcoming MSNBC show this month, and the Times Magazine has published a feature on the precocious 26-year-old, which discusses his hopes and ambitions for the show. (The show remains untitled, by the way, though the piece mentions Times New Ronan,Ronan the Barbarian and The Ronan Empireas the most popular suggestions floated on Twitter.)

Farrow said he hopes viewers will “walk away with the freshman-college knowledge, the cocktail-party take” on each topic he covers, as he hopes to convey enough information for the viewer to be able to “go to recount it to your friends, [and] you know the basics and also you know what the future is, and if you happen to care about the issue, what you can do with that.”

But will he be sharing stories about his childhood growing up with famous parents or anecdotes about his social life? Sorry, nope! “Not everything that’s said is going to be kind,” he said, “but over time, with the kind of show that we want to build and the emphasis on telling real stories, I think people will hate or love me based on the issues, not based on who I am.”

Ronan said the Mamma Mia-esque “Who’s Yer Dad?” mystery that has swirled around him since our interview with Mia Farrow in our November 2013 issue (in which she said Frank Sinatra could possibly be Ronan’s father), did cause MSNBC to fidget a bit. “There was a very serious conversation at MSNBC about, ‘Oh, crap, is this going distract from the story?’ Spoiler: Yes! . . . Look, I get it, it’s hilarious, it’s wild. There are salacious aspects of the story I’m able to sit back and appreciate with everybody else. And then it’s, ‘O.K., how do we move to the substance and redirect this conversation so we’re actually talking about stuff that’s useful?’”

Meanwhile, the profile spawns additional Ronan-related mysteries, as the opening graf refers to a recent interview Ronan conducted with a “big pop star in L.A.” for the show. While the musician is never named, Ronan recently appeared in an Instagram shot with one Miley Cyrus. Assuming she is indeed the “pop star” in question, there is a very specific quadrant of the Internet that should probably start stocking up on exclamation points now.